HOW I TOOK BACK MY POWER
And you can too….
I wake up with the weight of a hundred horses on my chest. I feel like a victim. Like nothing is going my way. That the people who held the promise of being there for me for a lifetime, slowly faded away, under one pretext or the other. I feel anxious all the time. I feel hurt and abandoned. I feel like its ‘each man for himself’. It’s difficult when you don’t know how a certain event or circumstance will turn out in your life or how a certain person will act/react to something you’ve said or done. It’s difficult when you have no control of the outcome.
This loss of control was driving me insane. I was raised to be prompt and courteous and so it formed a natural part of my personality. I expected people to be the same way….as me. To prioritize closing the loop, to revert back within a reasonable amount of time and to respect my space as I did theirs. But people are people. They come with their own web of complex emotions, experiences and attitudes. They may have their own anxious thoughts and their fair share of horses or what-have-you’s, resting comfortably on their chest. I expect certain things going a certain way and I feel immensely disappointed when they don’t. I used to feel an incessant need to control the outcome.
The moment I realised that it isn’t about me at all, it gave me an aha moment that I plan to take with me into the future, rather than my desire for control. Let’s face it, we cannot control other people — their words, their thoughts and their deeds. But that’s actually friggin amazing because they in turn cannot control ours. So, while we can sit and mope about how things aren’t going our way, those are, what is part of an inevitable external environment with all its moving parts.
This revelation did not make me wake up one morning and say ‘I don’t care anymore.’ It was a slow, deliberate and consistent process over time that rewired the neural pathways in my head to help my body understand that we were going a different way on the whole — ‘Will-they-wont-they’ reactions in the future. It was a deep understanding of the things I can control and what I cannot. So, whether it was a simple act of expecting a text/ email response OR something bigger like “Will I hear back about the job I applied to?”, my mind slowly understood what I was telling it to do and once it did, my life was very different.
When you have no need to control the outcome and are detached from it, there comes a lightness within your body that is unparalleled. You just take people for what they are — mere mortals. Some are capable of some amount of decency and will respond and respect you in the way you should be and some just won’t. Some people will be there for you unconditionally and some will run at the slightest glimmer of a low point in your life. That has more to do with them and their values/ priorities than you. To my amazement I have also found a rare breed of people who are as prompt/connected as can be and I have found a wonderful rhythm with them and they with me. The more you are a certain way, the more you will attract people that are the same way. Like attracts like. With the rest, leave them be and move on. Focus on the things that you have total control over. When you sit down and think about it, you will be amazed at how many there are.
Here’s a short list to help you get started.
Your beliefs
Your attitude
Your thoughts
Your perspective
How kind you are to others
How honest you choose to be
What books you read
The type of food you eat
How many risks you take
How you interpret situations
How you express yourself
What you do with your spare time
Whether you ask for help or handle things alone
Who you associate yourself with
How many times you smile today
How you make/spend/invest money
How often you say ‘I love you’
How much time you waste worrying about people/ external environment
The effort you put into making your dream life
How often you visit your past and how long you choose to stay there
Whether you choose to judge other people or not
How often are you mindful
How you deal with failure and setbacks
Ok I know I said a short list but once I started, I kept going. I was inspired by a post I saw from Kanwer Singh and instantly wanted to write about it. With the knowledge of this information, it was easy to understand how many things ARE within our control and therefore how much easier it is to relinquish the need to control everything.
I can go into a whole thing about manifestation and that what is right for us will eventually come to us without us having to push the agenda, but this article is more to do with our internal environment (the thing you can control). Whether what we want happens or not, we have to be ok on the inside.
That is true freedom and true ownership of your magnificent power.
